In a materials handling facility, such as an order fulfillment center, multiple customer orders are received, where each order specifies one or more items from inventory to be shipped to the customer that submitted the order. To fulfill the customer orders, the one or more items specified in each order may be retrieved, or picked, from inventory (which may also be referred to as stock storage) in the materials handling facility. Under direction of a control system, picked items may be singulated and then inducted into a conveyance mechanism that routes the items to particular destinations, such as sorting stations, in accordance with the customer orders currently being processed. One or more of the sorting stations can be designated for processing customer orders, or even subsets of customer orders, that include multiple items which have been designated by the control system to be grouped and packaged together in a single package. Such groups of items are often referred to in the industry as “multis.”
A sorting station for consolidating items into such groups or multis can include a sortation structure, such as type of sortation wall referred to as a “rebin” wall, which has a plurality of receptacles (also referred to herein as or “compartments” or “chutes”) in which the singulated items are grouped together, such as at a designated “rebin” portion of the chute located at an induction side of the wall. Once the multi has been fully consolidated in the rebin portion of the chute, the items thereof can be directed, such as by an associate manually pushing the items, across a boundary and into a designated “packing” portion of the chute adjacent an outlet side of the wall. From the packing portion of the chutes, the items can be collected and directed to an order processing station, such as a packing station at which the multis are processed, packed, and labeled for shipping to the customer. A picked, packed and shipped order, such as a multi, does not necessarily include all of the items ordered by the customer, as an outgoing shipment to a customer may include only a subset of the ordered items available to ship at one time from the materials handling facility.